Minggu, 07 April 2013

Starting a family can damage your credit history in five different ways

Put a family and raising children is expensive, and most couples understand this in general terms how to start this exciting and rewarding journey. But there are at least five hidden financial pitfalls that many couples don’t always see coming until it’s too late. It pays to be prepared.

Many couples operate on razor-thin margins, when living as DINKS (double income no kids). The equation changes dramatically with parenthood. A financial crisis can stain a credit history for years and impact future financial freedom. So worth it to understand and take steps to prepare five ways that starting a family can ruin your credit history: credit expansion outlet, extra expenses, lost income, lost work and cumulative impacts.

1-Expanding assets in preparation for the baby

Give birth to a child is often a time of great excitement for many couples. It is also a time of increasing expenditure, which means that lower savings, or intake of new debt. In both cases, these expenditures leave couples more vulnerable financially.

One of the eight couples have difficulty conceiving and you may need to use artificial reproduction techniques to reach their goal of having a family. Many of these treatments are not covered by insurance and can be quite expensive. For example, an IVF cycle can cost more than $ 10,000 per cycle. Often requires several cycles.

When MOM expects there may be need for a more reliable car, a bigger house and new baby accessories such as a crib, stroller, etc.

2-extra medical costs

Having a baby means couples will use medical services in a big way. During a normal pregnancy there will be medical visits and added extra monitoring: Sonograms, amniocentesis, etc. Most women choose to deliver in a hospital. Further use of health services results in added costs in the form of copays for doctor visits, deductibles, after wards and also sometimes co-insurance.

But not every couple is able to find insurance that does qualify for payments for a normal pregnancy. Only plans available through employer groups of 15 or more are needed to cover the medical costs of a normal pregnancy.

Couples looking for coverage in the individual market often find very unpleasant options: drivers with long waiting periods, or large franchises. Many couples are paying almost the entire medical bill for a normal pregnancy, with little or no benefit payments from the insurers.

But not every pregnancy is normal. Many encounter complications or the child was born early or with a disease. Then the medical bills can really pile up.

3-loss of income

In the United States, most women who work do not enjoy paid maternity leave. Unlike other countries, there is no federal requirement forcing employers paying parents who leave from work to recover from childbirth or care for their child at home.

The problem is compounded when MOM experiences complications before delivery and has to leave work much earlier than expected. Or something happens during birth and healing takes longer than usual. Many women experience postpartum depression and find it difficult to return to work at his previous level of productivity.

4-Lost work

When a working woman leaves her job there are some guarantees that his work will remain open, but not every woman has this warranty does not last forever. Many women find that once they are ready to return to work, the employer has chosen not to bring them back and is legally free to do so.

The Medici family leave Act (FMLA) provides permission to unpaid work lasting twelve weeks, for employees and employers. Qualifications are based on employee size and hours worked by the employee. Ten States have similar laws that expand the number of workers covered and/or the number of weeks of leave.

These laws have limits for who gets job protections and how long they last. Some women get nothing, and those occurring complications often find that permission expires long before you are physically able to return to the workforce.